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Reading Flann O’Brien on his centenary

David Wheatley

100 years on: time to find the right place for Flann O’Brien

Published: 5 October 2011

T
here is first of all the problem of what to call him: Brother Barnabas, Flann
O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen? The entity responsible under these and other
names for some of the finest and funniest modern Irish writing was born
Brian Ó Nualláin in Strabane on October 5, 1911. O’Brien (to settle on a
single cognomen) participated in the inaugural Bloomsday celebrations in
Dublin on June 16, 1954, at a time when the cult of James Joyce was neither
popular nor profitable in the land of his birth, and on April 1, 2011 he
acquired a date of his own on the Dublin literary calendar: Mylesday. In No
Laughing Matter, his biography of O’Brien, Anthony Cronin describes the
humorous misunderstanding of a Dublin publican in 1954 who believed that the
Bloomsday revellers were a funeral party (“Ah! the sign writer, little Jimmy
Joyce from Newtown Park Avenue”); but attempts to invoke the spirit of
O’Brien are also all too prone to miss their target. Even in his company,
Brendan Behan observed, it was necessary to look twice to ensure he was
there at all. Was it not odd, Carol Taaffe asked the crowd assembled in the
Palace Bar earlier this year, as she prepared to launch into an extract from
The Third Policeman, that Mylesday should be marked by readings, on the day
of its author’s death, from a posthumous novel narrated by a dead man?

If the O’Brien character has an unusual relationship with death, birth too can
be a complex affair, as in the case of John Furriskey from At
Swim-Two-Birds, “born at the age of twenty-five” and equipped with a memory
“but without a personal experience to account for it”. Author of one of At
Swim-Two-Birds’ several novels-within-a-novel, Furriskey enjoys the solitude
of the artist and a fraught relationship with his creations. Tension between
the individual and the crowd is a constant feature of O’Brien’s work, as in
his monstrous creation The Plain People of Ireland, who regularly gatecrash
his newspaper columns with their vociferous and philistine blather. The art
of being alone in the crowd is one O’Brien acquired in childhood: despite
the presence in Avoca Terrace, Blackrock, of twelve children, the household
has been described as a place of “profound silence”. Irish was the language
of the home, a fact adduced by many critics to account for the sense that
O’Brien handles English as a second, or even (inverting the usual Irish–
English dichotomy) a dead language. O’Brien was a heavy but solitary drinker
in later life, in but not of the crowd, and alcohol as social lubricant
plays a large part in his work, from the stout-swilling students of At
Swim-Two-Birds to James Joyce’s unexpected second career as a barman in
Skerries in The Dalkey Archive.

Many of his brilliant juvenilia bear the stamp of the pub wit, such as
Blather, a one-man orchestra of a student-paper thundering in a telephone
box, with its mock-solemn headlines (“Whither Bettystown? Progress or Decay?
Our Stern Attitude”), quipping bouts de rimes (“The poetry they write in
Ranelagh / Gets banelagh and banelagh”) and ubiquitous photographs of Eamon
de Valera. From here O’Brien graduated to the letters page of the Irish
Times, which he used as a playpen for absurdist pranks, publishing
long-winded and contradictory letters under a myriad of assumed names, until
the far-sighted editor, R. M. Smyllie, invited him to contribute a column,
“Cruiskeen Lawn”. This was in 1940, also the year of the traumatic rejection
of The Third Policeman, the novel thereafter languishing in a drawer until
the author’s death. Within a year of his winning James Joyce’s praise for At
Swim-Two-Birds (“That’s a real writer, with a true comic spirit”), it seemed
O’Brien’s career was over and his best work behind him; so at least runs the
standard account. The photograph (above) of O’Brien standing by a road sign
marked “Dublin diversion” hints strongly at the alternative fate that now
beckoned. In a short story of 1954, “Two Into One”, one taxidermist murders
another and dresses himself in his victim’s skin before ending up arrested
for his own disappearance and murder; by now the mask of Myles the Dublin
diversion had fused over the face not just of Brian O’Nolan, but of Flann
O’Brien too, before the novelist’s unexpected re-emergence in the 1960s.

His centenary is as good a time as any to reassess the justice of this
verdict, and the collection of essays, “Is It About a Bicycle?”: Flann
O’Brien in the twenty-first century, edited by Jennika Baines (Four Courts
Press), makes an honourable attempt to blast the author free of
over-familiar mythology. In the early days of Irish Studies, the assumption
was easily made that one became a writer of world importance by leaving
behind specifically Irish concerns – a tendency Declan Kiberd has diagnosed
in Joyce’s first biographer, Richard Ellmann. Critics have not been wanting
to lead O’Brien down the same path, but something intractable in his work
will always hold out against these designs. For a start, critics of the
Irish Free State hardly come more steeped in the Gaelic culture to which
official ideology paid such elaborate lip service. When the Free State did
produce Irish-language authors of major achievement (as the parallel career
of Máirtín Ó Cadhain also reminds us), it rarely knew what to do with them.
O’Brien’s irritation at the chasm between Gaelic aspiration and reality
shaped many early “Cruiskeen Lawn” columns, as when he marks St Patrick’s
Day with a “Speak English Week” campaign rather than join in the witless
Irish-language celebrations of other papers.

Criticism of the Free State’s failings was unpalatable in his day job as a
civil servant, let alone under a pseudonym in the Irish Times: in 1943
O’Nolan was sent to investigate a fire in a Cavan orphanage in which
thirtyfive children died, and was privately outraged when the official
report blamed the tragedy on faulty wiring, despite the evident culpability
of local nuns. The civil servant expressed his true feelings in unpublished
satirical verse, but when Seán Ó Faoláin, his natural ally in the struggle
against officialdom, is mentioned in “Cruiskeen Lawn”, it is almost always
as a figure of fun. Instinctively suspicious of the aesthete as a moral
crusader, O’Brien told his publisher in 1939 that Ó Faoláin was “a decent
man” but “the most unspeakable boob without a glimmer of humour”.

This antipathy marks a further aspect of O’Brien’s anomalousness as an Irish
modernist: his criticism of Irish cultural paralysis comes not just from
within the machinery of the Irish state, but drives its author ever further
from postures of defiance unless in heavily coded and cryptic form (O’Brien
is one Irish author at least whose work never troubled the censor). With its
leg-pulling apparatus of notes and warring commentators, The Third Policeman
has been read (by Keith Hopper and others) as a shift from the modernist to
postmodernist self-consciousness turned in on itself and the masterworks of
the quack genius De Selby, in the hope of making sense of its hostile and
terrifying world. Hell looks much like Tullamore: but what, we might ask
ourselves, would constitute O’Brien’s idea of heaven? Shaun Svoolish, hero
of “Scenes in a Novel” (1934), leads an assault on realist prose fiction
yet, where his own fate is concerned, aspires not to a Dedalian escape to
Paris, but a safe berth in the Irish civil service. Officialdom may be hell,
but it is one that requires O’Brien’s presence as its flickering voice of
conscience, and one whose idiocies are too close to the satirical heart of
his work for a life beyond its confines to be seriously imagined (it is
hardly a coincidence that his retirement from the civil service in 1953
triggered not newfound creativity, but repeated absences from his column).

O’Brien’s counterblast to the Free State’s failures was never more
withering than in the novel An Béal Bocht (1941; translated by Patrick Power
as The Poor Mouth), but even its satirical thrust is easily misconstrued. It
is not, for instance, an attack on Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An t-Oileánach (The
Islandman), a book O’Brien revered, but on the decline of the folk memoir
into cliché and self-parody and its appropriation by the Free State as a
staple of Irish Irelandism. When Ó Criomhthain concludes The Islandman with
“mar ná beidh ár leithéidí arís ann” (our likes will not be seen again), he
is belatedly conceding the exoticism of island life for his readers on the
mainland, but in his incontinent overuse of the phrase O’Brien’s narrator
captures a society in the grip of profound self-alienation, thrown back on
the formula in the absence of any supporting experience. The tautology of
Irish Ireland was an unfailing fillip: “Why must this Irish nation so
continually salute itself?”, O’Brien asks in a wartime column, while a
language activist in An Béal Bocht insists that it is not enough to speak in
Irish: we must speak in Irish, but only on the subject of the Irish language
itself.

As Carol Taaffe has shown in her exemplary Through the Looking Glass: Flann
O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and Irish cultural debate, the trigger for
O’Brien’s attacks on the language movement in the 1940s was less the fusty
antiquarians of the Gaelic League than a new and radical wing of activists
such as those of the quasi-fascist Ailtirí na hAiséirighe, who advocated the
banning of the English language altogether. Beneath his absurdist guying,
O’Brien’s true feelings on these groups was not in doubt: “how appalling to
even glimpse a company of these bone-headed morons”, he writes on December
13, 1943. Adrian Naughton and Richard T. Murphy, in “Is It About a
Bicycle?”, put the Gaelic Myles to excellent revisionist use, Naughton in a
consideration of O’Brien’s Master’s thesis on Irish-language nature poetry,
and Murphy on the self-consciously “minor” style of An Béal Bocht.

O’Brien’s journalism too has struggled with perceptions of its minor status.
Its author fretted that his column deprived him of a readership beyond
Ireland, and made sporadic efforts in his last years to publish in British
papers but, no less than James Clarence Mangan’s career a hundred years
earlier, O’Brien’s was a writing life whose pulse was synchronized all too
perfectly with the workings of the Dublin press. “Cruiskeen Lawn” is the
white whale of modern Irish writing, all 3 million words and more of it over
its twenty-six-year life, a sprawling opus which, Carol Taaffe and other
Mylesians (the term “Flanneurs” is also used) have argued, represents its
author’s true masterpiece. Despite the many volumes of “cuttings” from its
pages, the question of how best to read it, and in what form, remains vexed,
and exercises Jon Day’s essay “Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn: bibliographical
issues in the republication of Myles na gCopaleen’s journalism”. Keenly
aware of his position as a Gaelic cuckoo in the Anglo-Irish nest of the
Irish Times, Myles would frequently disagree with leading articles just a
few inches from his own column, using arrows and pointing hands to signal
his displeasure; on one occasion, reproduced in facsimile by Day, he makes a
hostile incursion into his neighbour “Quidnunc”’s column before retreating
back within his own enclave.

“I have suffered a grievous loss”, Samuel Whybrow quotes Herman Reich in an
essay on The Third Policeman as a science fiction novel; “when my donkey had
learned the art of going without food, it died”. The coincidence of
vindication and failure captures perfectly the situation of Old Mathers’s
ghost, who rationalizes his murder and lingering afterlife with a philosophy
of answering all questions in the negative, no matter what contradictions
this entails. O’Brien’s own position in these years is not dissimilar, as
the persistence of the Free State’s fools in their folly drives the author
further into inner émigré status, hiding in plain view behind the impeccably
nay-saying mask of “Cruiskeen Lawn”. Writing as George Knowall in one of the
later columns collected as Myles Away from Home, O’Brien proposed a quiz
whose correct answers would all be the opposite of the obvious answers, and
as a commentary on Irish life in the post-war period O’Brien’s writing too
is best described as counterintuitive.

Much touted as a panacea for the Free State’s backwardness, modernity (again,
contra the usual readings of An Béal Bocht) can appear at best misguided and
at worst murderous. Whybrow considers O’Brien’s attitude to the theory of
relativity, and the brave new worlds it promised; the explosion of the
atomic bomb in 1945, noted with horror in “Cruiskeen Lawn”, suggested that
the gifts of modern science to the world might not be purely benevolent. The
Third Policeman is full of brilliant but useless inventions, objects too
small to be seen, such as a spear “so thin that maybe it does not exist at
all”, refusing the deathly science of atomic warfare only by pledging
themselves to utter redundancy. With his passion for mathematics, Eamon de
Valera had enticed the Nobel laureate Erwin Schroedinger to head an
Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, and while Schroedinger spun
paradoxes of a cat both alive and dead inside an unopened box, the unnamed
narrator of The Third Policeman (itself locked in an unopened box until
1967) needs the authority of life-in-death to speak the truth of the
death-in-life of contemporary Ireland.

Adrian Naughton makes a similar point when he reproaches Anthony Cronin for
condemning the observations of nature in The Third Policeman and An Béal
Bocht as “limited and generalized”. O’Brien in his MA thesis had eulogized
the imagistic freshness and immediacy of Old Irish nature writing, and if
the backdrops to his novels seem artificial and contrived, their author knew
very well what he was up to. In the letter to William Saroyan usually
reproduced at the end of The Third Policeman, O’Brien describes the
“re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the
unremembered”, and the hellish contrivance of restarting the action where we
began can easily blind readers to the subtle differences between the novel’s
beginning and end. In this it strongly resembles the circular ending of
Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, which repeats Moran’s opening statements (“It is
midnight. Rain is beating against the window”) before savagely cancelling
them (“It was not midnight. It was not raining”). It is not that the memory
of the original event becomes fainter with each repetition, but that the
repetitions are forced to stand in for the absence of meaning or value in
this original event itself, if it ever occurred. Our likes may not be seen
again, but have we so much as been here in the first place? O’Brien and
Beckett’s shared passion for bicycles has often been remarked, and while the
bicycle’s status as mechanical proxy appeals to both novelists, the
resemblance between its chain and the infinity symbol is another suggestive
factor.

O’Brien’s career is a lopsided affair, and no amount of special pleading for
The Hard Life and The Dalkey Archive can disguise the tragic loss of power
in his final years, whatever its ultimate cause, whether the psychological
blow of The Third Policeman’s rejection, drink, Ireland, or other. With an
odd symmetry, his last years are as littered with fragmentary and inchoate
projects as the early days of the 1930s, but the late unfinished prose
fragment Slattery’s Sago Saga does not bode well for the work that might
have followed. His branching into writing for television is another
unexpected development of these last years, as described by Amy Nejezchleb
in “Myles, Modernity, and Irish National Television”, though like many
a travelling Irish fiddler who did not possess an instrument of his own,
O’Brien the RTE scriptwriter did not possess a television. On March 2, 1966,
he wrote with complete candour and complete non-self-disclosure that
“temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any
individual has the right to expect”. On April 1, he was dead. To Seán Ó
Faoláin, Flann O’Brien was “the man in the Gaelic mask”, but almost a
half-century after his death there is no suggestion that archives of
personal papers or letters might help us trace the human face behind the
mask. The mask was the man and the mystery remains.

O’Brien has long been seen as part of a literary trinity whose two other
members are Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh, but in the final
contribution to “Is It About a Bicycle?”, Frank McNally reminds us that he
more naturally belongs in the company of Joyce and Beckett. O’Brien had a
difficult relationship with Joyce, coming to resent the older writer’s
assumed influence on his work, while on his only meeting with Beckett he
disparaged Joyce as a “refurbisher of skivvies’ stories”. Lines of
succession are rarely simple and, as critics have noted, O’Brien’s work
relegates parents almost entirely in favour of uncles and brothers, while
its principal model of parent–child relations is that of a character intent
on destroying his author. Yet for all his resistance to appointed lines of
succession, his canonical status is beyond dispute: the carnivalesque
exuberance of At Swim-Two-Birds, the disturbing vision of The Third
Policeman and the comic riches of “Cruiskeen Lawn” are the work of an
undeniably major talent. If Joyce and Beckett are father and son, as McNally
insists, O’Brien is the holy ghost of Irish modernist writing.

A welcome participant in the Myles celebrations was “the brother”, Brian
O’Nolan’s artist sibling Micheál Ó Nualláin, but had the man himself lived
to be a hundred his reaction on finding his afternoon watering hole
commandeered by a phalanx of “corduroys” (his pejorative term for bohemian
types) can only be imagined. Happily, the Palace remains equipped with a
superb snug from whose safety, amid much rancorous muttering, he might have
dashed off a brilliant “Cruiskeen Lawn” piece on the subject. The third
policeman, Sergeant Fox, inhabits a twilight world between his police
station walls, and the spirit of Myles too endures in unlikely interstices,
in the cracks between English and Irish, sense and nonsense, high modernism
and hack journalism. Unlike the fantasy treasures of The Third Policeman,
which the nameless narrator is forbidden to bring back above ground, the
darkly incomparable prose Flann O’Brien mined from these marginal zones is
real and, unlike its author, managed to make it back alive.

David Wheatley’s most recent collection of poems, A Nest on the Waves,
appeared last year.